Looks like SOF missed the memo:
There is wiggle room in the status-of-forces agreement with Baghdad that was worked out in 2008, in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. Pentagon officials expect some U.S. forces to remain, even though the agreement calls for all troops to be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.
Those holdovers may include some of the 3,000 Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force and other specialized warriors who remain locked in combat.
With regular U.S. ground combat brigades leaving, special forces commandos have become the key to successfully handing over all military duties to the Iraqis 15 months from now.
The commandos train Iraqis to do the jobs of American soldiers. They also make up joint terrorist-hunting units with government troops to rid the country of al Qaeda operatives tied to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan…
“There was no reduction of SOF during the drawdown,” Col. Conder said. “The U.S. special operations mission has not changed.”
The bug hunts will continue in concert with Iraq’s internal security apparatus. And Foreign Internal Defense is a classic mission set for the Green Berets, in particular, and is defined as “participation by civilian and military agencies of a government in any of the action programs taken by another government or other designated organization to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency.” FID requires a host nation in partnership, and so long as the Iraqi government remains deadlocked – and Iran continues to play its nasty little games in the Shi’a heartland – that relationship will continue to be problematical.
Still:
“Belgium’s government is also deadlocked,” (Globalsecurity.org’s John) Pike said. “Caracas has violence comparable to Baghdad, and yet the sun still comes up in the east every day. Seriously dysfunctional countries can muddle through somehow, even if they are not attractive vacation destinations.”
Although when Caracas levels of violence arrive in Belgium, I believe that Mr. Pike will be a little less blithe.
Given the Belgian gov’s leftist predilictions, the level of violence will eventually rise to that of Caracas’s current levels. The penalty for stupidity, historically, is death. The Belgians have been plenty stupid.
Pike excels at the Art of Being Blithe and has much experience at it. For those here who may not know, as senior staff member and project director at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) for 17 years, before founding globalsecurity.org in 2000, he is often quoted/used for various stories on a broad range of topics, including this one in the WT. He appears to have little compunction over the style of his turning of a phrase or analogy. The reporter has quotes from GEN Odierno and COL Conder, a snippet from former CIA Ops-O for the region, and then decides to see what Pike has to say about it. Not uncommon.
Years ago, FAS was a handy online ready-reference for those willing to take it all with a grain of salt, prior to the proliferation of other sites with similar but more reliable content (many of them now within mil/gov domains). He built the FAS website and was responsible for the posting of much of the stuff there not available anywhere else online (in some cases with good reason). But that’s a different thread.
My perception is the problem with Pike, blithe as he may be, is that he is often correct in his analyses, and perhaps annoyingly, knows it.
It was a stupid thing to say. This, perhaps, was the more important quote: “Al Qaeda has not been suppressed, corruption is rampant, the political system is deadlocked, Iran has significant political influence, high levels of violence persist, their military remains incapable of either operating without U.S. support or defending the country against external enemies.”
He would have been well off to just leave it there. But then, that’s Pike.
Is this SOF ‘stay-behind’ force the logical flip-side of Kennedy’s SOF ‘investment’ in Vietnam? With no claim at expertise, what I remember is that we kept ‘doubling-down’ on our SOF investment then.
And if violence escalates upon main-force withdrawal, will we ‘lighten-up’ on SOF as reverse symmetry would suggest? Identify and blame an Iraqi Thiệu and go home?